Irena Sendler, saviour of children in the Warsaw ghetto, died on May
12th, aged 98

POLAND suffered more than any other European country during the second
world war. And there was an extra twist: the history of that suffering
was then systematically distorted by the Soviet-imposed Communist
rulers, and widely misunderstood abroad. Auschwitz, for example, is
still often referred to as a "Polish death camp"--rather than one run
by the country's Nazi occupiers, in which huge numbers of Polish
citizens perished. And gentile Poles are typically imagined to have
rejoiced, collaborated or simply stood by as their Jewish compatriots
were exterminated. Poles, said the former Israeli leader Yitzhak
Shamir, "imbibe anti-Semitism with their mother's milk."

Certainly prejudice was prevalent in pre-war Poland; but many Poles
defied it. One of the bravest was Irena Sendler. As a doctor's
daughter, she had been brought up in a house that was open to anyone in
pain or need, Jew or gentile. In the segregated lecture halls at Warsaw
University, where she studied Polish literature, she and likeminded
friends deliberately sat on the "Jewish" benches. When nationalist
thugs beat up a Jewish friend, she defaced her grade card, crossing out
the stamp that allowed her to sit on the "Aryan" seats. For that, the
university suspended her for three years. All this was good preparation
for the defiance she was to show after 1939, when the Germans invaded.

She was, a friend said, "born to selflessness, not called to it".
Certainly she had good genes. A rebellious great-grandfather was
deported to Siberia. Her father died of typhus in 1917, after treating
patients his colleagues shunned. Many were Jewish. Leaders of the
Jewish community offered money to her hard-up mother for young Irena's
education. Like many social workers in pre-war Poland, Mrs Sendler
belonged to the Socialist party: not for its political ideology, she
said, but because it combined compassion with dislike of money-worship.
No religion motivated her: she acted Z POTRZEBY SERCA, "from the need
of my heart".

Under Nazi occupation the Jews of Warsaw were herded into the city
ghetto: four square kilometres for around 400,000 souls. Even before
the deportations to the Treblinka death camp started, death could be
arbitrary and instant. Yet a paradox created a sliver of hope. Squalor
and near-starvation (the monthly bread ration was two kilos, or 4.5lb)
created ideal conditions for typhus, which would have killed Germans
too. So the Nazis allowed Mrs Sendler and her colleagues in and out of
the tightly guarded ghetto to distribute medicines and vaccinations.

That bureaucratic loophole allowed her to save more Jews than the far
better known Oscar Schindler. It was astonishingly risky. Some children
could be smuggled out in lorries, or in trams supposedly returning
empty to the depot. More often they went by secret passageways from
buildings on the outskirts of the ghetto. To save one Jew, she
reckoned, required 12 outsiders working in total secrecy: drivers for
the vehicles; priests to issue false baptism certificates; bureaucrats
to provide ration cards; and most of all, families or religious orders
to care for them. The penalty for helping Jews was instant execution.

NAMES IN GLASS JARS

To make matters even riskier, Mrs Sendler insisted on recording the
children's details to help them trace their families later. These were
written on pieces of tissue paper bundled on her bedside table; the
plan was to hurl them out of the window if the Gestapo called. The
Nazis did catch her (thinking she was a small cog, not the linchpin of
the rescue scheme) but did not find the files, secreted in a friend's
armpit. Under torture she revealed nothing. Thanks to a well-placed
bribe, she escaped execution; the children's files were buried in glass
jars. Mrs Sendler spent the rest of the war under an assumed name.

The idea of a heroine's treatment appalled her. "I feel guilty to this
day that I didn't do more," she said. Besides, she felt she had been a
bad daughter, risking her elderly mother's life with her wartime work,
a bad wife to both her husbands, and a neglectful mother. Her daughter
once asked to be admitted to the children's home where her mother
worked after the war, in order to see more of her.

Mrs Sendler need not have worried. Far from being honoured, she
narrowly avoided a death sentence from the Communist authorities. Her
crime was that her work had been authorised and financed by the Polish
government-in-exile in London; later, she helped soldiers of the Home
Army, the wartime resistance. Both outfits were now reviled as
imperialist stooges. In 1948 repeated interrogations by the secret
police in late pregnancy cost the life of her second child, born
prematurely. She was not allowed to travel, and her children could not
study full-time at university. "What sins have you got on your
conscience, Mama?" her daughter asked her.

It was not until 1983 that the Polish authorities allowed her to travel
to Jerusalem, where a tree was planted in her honour at Yad Vashem.
Many of the children she had saved sought her out: now elderly
themselves, all grateful, but some still yearning for details of their
forgotten parents. In 2003 she received Poland's highest honour, the
order of the White Eagle. It came a little late.